Red Hill Primary School

At Red Hill Primary School, we are passionate about English. We promote a love of reading, writing and drama, as well as equipping children with the phonetical, comprehension, spelling, grammar and punctuation skills needed to be adept and fluent readers and writers.

The skills that children are taught in Literacy underpin all other subjects. They enable pupils to communicate and express themselves in all areas of their work. Teachers will always make cross-curricular links wherever appropriate and will plan for pupils to apply the skills, knowledge and understanding that they have acquired during Literacy to other areas of the curriculum.

Writing at Red Hill Primary School

"The programmes of study for writing at key stages 1 and 2 are constructed similarly to those for reading:

• transcription (spelling and handwriting)
• composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech and writing)

It is essential that teaching develops pupils’ competence in these 2 dimensions. In addition, pupils should be taught how to plan, revise and evaluate their writing". (National Curriculum, 2014)

Red Hill writers

Children have many opportunities to write, edit and improve. They are creative and imaginative writers. With links to the rest of the curriculum, we give children opportunities to engage in cross curricular writing. With a good foundation of reading, children are able to access all areas of the curriculum. Through phonics and spelling teaching and learning, children are given the skills to fluently express themselves and articulate their ideas.

CUSP curriculum

We follow the CUSP Curriculum for Writing. Expert subject knowledge is carefully woven into each Writing module which gives teachers the opportunity to teach and rehearse key knowledge and skills before applying this learning to meaningful extended outcomes. The careful architecture of this curriculum ensures that pupils build on prior learning and maximise purposeful curriculum connections to become writers for life. Within the CUSP curriculum, punctuation and grammar is taught both directly and discreetly with pupils receiving a daily SPaG lesson. CUSP Writing also draws on taught content from the depth study of core texts from the literature spine.

Writing in EYFS

In Reception, we believe that to be a successful writer the children need to have both the desire to have something to write about, and the physical capability to master a writing tool. To inspire the children to write we carefully plan play opportunities throughout our learning environment so that children see writing as part of play, and a vital means to communicate. As adults, we model this by immersing ourselves in their play so we can model purposeful writing and encourage the children to follow our lead.